Common Marketing Mistakes

Like any other field, marketing is no exception to its practitioners doing the same mistakes at scale.

The following are common marketing mistakes one should avoid at all costs.

1. Making changes without data

The biggest advantage that online marketers have over traditional marketers is the ability to track their results.

Be it likes, comments, shares, links or time on site.

When making changes to your website or page, always start with one metric in mind to achieve.

Ask yourself: “What is the one metric that I want to see improve as result of this change?”

In any business, the mother of all metrics to track is revenue.

But what enables the revenue?

If you are a consultant, the number of qualified leads determines your revenue the most.

If you are a SaaS company, leads also play the biggest role.

With that in mind, make changes to your site or funnel with the data you have to achieve the metric you want.

Do not make changes simply because you think you ought to be testing – do it because you need to (and do it with a clear outcome in mind).

2. Chasing tactics all the time

Tactics are the short hacks and tips that a lot of blogs publish about.

While some tactics do indeed bring in a lot of results, take the time to learn principles of psychology and overall strategy instead.

The truth is that tactics are sexier and it sets you up for quick wins.

But if you understand the basic tenets and principles of human psychology, you can create an overall strategy that delivers results and create your own set of tactics to popularize.

It is best to go back to basics and master them instead.

Often times, the best marketers have a solid foundation in the basics which enable them to execute on tactics more effectively than others and create their own methods for their thought leadership purposes.

3. Making short term gain for long term losses

It is very tempting to do something that will help you solve a nagging problem at the moment without fully understanding the long term effect of it.

For example, if you are doing linkbuilding and your KPI’s are measured on a weekly basis, it may be tempting to squeeze in a few easy links (the ones that require no editorial review) to achieve your KPI’s. But over time, easy links such as these would affect your rankings and cause more harm than good.

If you are doing content marketing, you may be in the habit of doing short and above average content just for the sake of it.

If you used up some of the time to create long form remarkable content, the thought of it being not received may be deemed a waste of time. It may not work. But if it does, the effects can last for years.

4. Lack of organization

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Have you figured out how many e-mails you ought to send for outreach this week?

Do you have your editorial calendar set out and what types of content to create for this week?

If you are a solo marketer, planning your week out can help you prioritize (and remind you when you are slacking off).

Lack of organization plays a larger role if you run an agency or intend to get some help to expand your marketing efforts.

It is best to document your processes so that you can reduce the time and energy whenever you do onboarding.

Use tools such as ScreenFlow to record yourself on how you would do specific tasks – e.g. e-mail outreach, how you find content ideas, how you do research.

5. Doing too many things at a time

“Things” in this context means any form of channel, project or experiments.

It is easy to think that we can do it all, that we can throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks.

But overstretching yourself and end up not achieving any real results due to your frazzled focus is worse.

Try to limit yourself to just 2 to 3 major projects at a time and rank them by priority.

It’s better to have your focus concentrated on just a few things so that you can swiftly move on to your next project with confidence knowing that you gave it your all.